Watch him crack jokes about his height. See him schmooze celebrity broadcasters. Marvel as he puts on a pair of oversized black sunglasses and, with a wide smile, announce the following to the world:

"Hey diddle diddle, my shades are looking frizzle!"

This was Ray Rice at the Super Bowl yesterday, and if it hadn’t hit you yet how far he has come since his days in Piscataway, it will after seeing and hearing from him this week.

Rice didn’t just handle the grind at media day. He owned it. Honestly, if he makes the game look as easy as the annual media cattle call, he’ll rush for 200 yards, score three touchdowns and win the MVP trophy in a rout for the Ravens — all without getting his uniform dirty.

This probably shouldn’t be a surprise. Rice, after all, has been an NFL star for a long time. Still, it isn’t hard to remember the days when he arrived at Rutgers as a guarded teenager who didn’t like giving interviews.

It isn’t hard to remember when Rice never quite met the eye of the person asking the questions, a little bit shy, a little bit distrustful. Football came easy. Everything else took a bit longer, and he started to let his personality show late in his breakout sophomore year.

Just look at him now.

"I’ve been through enough in my life that I just have to smile," Rice said from his media-day platform. "There are people out there who are really hurting, fighting cancer and all kinds of sicknesses, and here I am playing at the Super Bowl. What do I have to complain about?"

This will be a good weekend for Rutgers fans, no matter who wins the game Sunday. If the 49ers win, they’ll know that Anthony Davis, the highest draft pick in Rutgers history, will celebrate with a title.

But it’s a safe guess that most Rutgers fans are rooting for Baltimore, and that’s because of Rice. There will always be a bond between the program and its first breakout star. If you were making a list of the people most responsible for its rise from the bottom of the sport to Big Ten membership, you’d put the coach who recruited Rice at the top, of course.

Greg Schiano is 1, but Rice is 1A. He is still the best salesman this program has, the reason that Rutgers sent a video crew to media day to capture this moment. Rice not only showed what high school stars could accomplish at Rutgers, but he keeps showing what they can do in the NFL.

So his old fans, the ones who wore his No. 27 jerseys on Saturdays in Piscataway, will savor this. Rice hasn’t forgotten you, either. He rejoiced in the Big Ten news, just like everyone else, and continues to offer advice to current players.

"I see myself as a pioneer for them," Rice said. "When I see somebody like Jawan Jamison chasing my records, it feels good. I sort of felt like Eric Dickerson with Adrian Peterson chasing his — well, I still got it!"

Rice smiled. He never stopped doing that. He talked about getting to the end zone at the Superdome and showing the world his biceps. He talked about the guilty pleasures in his diet — "mom’s cooking … more mom’s cooking!" — and lamented a shellfish allergy that keeps him from trying the gumbo here.

He worked the crowd. He knew the regular Baltimore reporters by name and cracked jokes at their mutual expense. He saw Stuart Scott, the ESPN anchor who is battling cancer again, and wished him luck on his recovery.

Chris Berman, the longtime ESPN host, worked his way to a spot next to Rice and talked to him for five minutes, then spent the next few minutes gushing about how Rice has become one of the favorites for the network’s talent to interview.

"Look at his face! He doesn’t even have to speak — look at his face!" Berman said. "He’s one of the athletes we love to cover. He’s a wonderful kid. We root for him all the time. Every one of our guys love him."

On the field, it is hard not to love watching a player who can consistently make something out of nothing. The four straight 1,000-yard rushing seasons, with 1,143 on the ground and 478 on receptions in 2012, are a testament to that.

But nothing defines Rice as a running back better than the single best play in the entire NFL season, when he took a little swing pass from one yard behind the line of scrimmage and converted turned it into an impossible conversion on fourth-and-29 that helped save the Ravens’ season.

It was spectacular on so many levels, and for Rutgers fans, it was familiar. The player who helped put their program on the map has a chance to star in the Super Bowl now, but he’s already been a star in New Orleans.